So that seems to be the format - Cait hosts shows where people picks songs etc.

The bit I've heard ( since University Challenge ended at 8.30) has featured Robbie Robertson and Ralph Stanley , Cait mentioning being at the Carnegie Hall Down From the Mountains show , no mention being made of you-know-who who emceed it.

'I was toxic and depressed'Cait O'RiordanBassist, the Pogues, 1982-1986

In the 1980s, the Pogues had it all: critical acclaim and commercial success. By walking out when she did, O'Riordan missed singing on their biggest hit - 1987's Christmas No 2, Fairytale of New York, sung instead by Kirsty MacColl.

I was a very angry, dysfunctional teenager from a dysfunctional family, who was living in hostels. Music was a classic gloomy teenager's outlet and after school I'd go to Camden in search of vinyl. Shane [MacGowan] was working in a record shop. We went for a drink and he said, "You can be the bass player." I had a bass but couldn't play it; the band took the time to say, "Put this finger there." I had no talent except for causing trouble, and I joined the coolest band in London.

The band were always having to get me out of scraps. I'd start fights I couldn't possibly finish. They tolerated me, because most of the people in the band were the same, and - this was soon after punk rock - an obnoxious teenager who liked to get drunk and fight probably looked like a cool character. I can remember fragments, like being on stage at Glasgow Barrowlands and feeling like it was the best thing in the world. But I never realised how lucky I was. [After beginning a relationship with Pogues producer Elvis Costello] I felt I'd outstayed my welcome. I didn't regret leaving: I was always absolutely certain I was right.

I was financially secure, which enabled me to get deeper into alcohol. I rejoined the Pogues in 2002 for a two-week tour, but they didn't ask me back and I don't blame them. They're older guys; most of them don't drink now. I was toxic and dysfunctional. I told a doctor that I was either developing schizophrenia or possessed. [In 2003] I had a breakdown, aged 38. The doctor put me in a psychiatric hospital and they diagnosed me as having depression; I had probably had it for a very long time. The psychiatrist said, "You've built a crust around you." It was revelatory.

I'm a completely different person now. I go to the gym. I'm studying to become a psychologist. Money and success just brought unhappiness, but I desperately miss playing. If anyone needs a bass player, call me. When I was doing my exams, there was a poster up for the Pogues, who were playing in the same building. I thought, "I wish there was someone I could talk to about how weird this feels".

It was the moment when Shane MacGowan decided he could not sit back and do nothing. He had to rush out a single to raise money for victims of the Haiti earthquake when he first heard what Simon Cowell's hand-picked starlets had done with REM's 'Everybody Hurts'.

"When I heard that shite, I thought 'f*** it', let's show him how it's done' and that's how we came to do our version of 'I Put A Spell On You'. That's what a charity single should sound like, Tree Trunk Neck."

I'm sitting with the three in a Donnybrook restaurant, on the street where MacGowan and Clarke share a home, and when they are not maligning the X Factor and American Idol judge, they're talking about how they took Screamin' Jay Hawkins' 1956 classic and made something new and special.

"'I Put A Spell On You' is so uplifting, so energetic," Clarke says. "We wanted to release something that would be worth buying in its own right, and not just for a very good cause. We're not saying that you shouldn't buy the Cowell single -- just don't listen to it."

It was Clarke who assembled some of music's greatest names to make the record at short notice. "We've got Nick Cave, (Sex Pistol's) Glen Matlock, (Primal Scream's) Bobby Gillespie, Johnny Depp on it -- and loads more," she says. "Cait plays bass on it."

It is a measure of MacGowan's standing in the rock world that such names can be summoned so readily. "They adore Shane," Clarke says. "Bono was going to do it as well, but he then thought it might be overkill as he's doing something similar himself."

MacGowan is looking every inch the rock star today. He's dressed all in black and wears motorcycle gloves and dark glasses. His dyed black hair is swept into a rockabilly quiff.

Initially, he comes across as truculent -- "you're a journalist so you can put all this on f***ing expenses," he snarls -- but then he mellows, particularly if a conversation subject arouses his attention.

A conversation with Shane MacGowan invariably lurches into unexpected territory. I ask him how difficult it is to retain creativity and he launches into a rant about his diminishing sex life. "It's f***ing miserable."

The strangest things animate him. Jedward, for instance. "I think they're f***ing great," he says. And he admits to liking Ronan Keating's much-derided version of MacGowan's masterful song, 'Fairytale of New York'. "He's a good singer," he says. I search his face for irony, but there is none. "No, honestly he is."

He's not nearly as pleased with Elvis Costello, citing his production on The Pogues' famous song, 'A Rainy Night in Soho', as something that irritates him. "He f***ing murdered it."

Perhaps his criticism of Costello is for O'Riordan's benefit. She and Costello had a relationship, having met in 1985, and they went on to have a 16-year relationship. It ended badly in 2002. "I don't see him any more," she says. "It's better that way."

She corrects the common perception that they were married. "There would have been alimony if we were," she says half-ruefully.

O'Riordan spent time in the celebrity rehab of choice, The Priory -- "at a thousand quid a day" -- and hasn't had a drink in three years. "I've never felt better," this very youthful 45-year-old says, and talks with enthusiasm about an academic prize she is to receive from UCD. "College has given me the sort of structure my life badly needed."

I ask MacGowan if he would consider drying out. "Why would I do that?" he says, genuinely surprised. "I don't drink as much as I used to. I can handle it."

He appears to be telling the truth. I interviewed him five years ago and he drank three pints of Guinness and three whiskies in an hour. This time, he sips just two glasses of Prosecco and doesn't demand a refill.

He's more coherent than last time, but he struggles to articulate his thoughts clearly. The lack of teeth makes his speech difficult to follow and when he laughs, it's with the sort of wheeze an espresso machine makes.

Clarke treats him gently, almost maternally. They have been together for 25 years. "We're soul mates," she says. He grunts, but I can see he's pleased.

Some time ago, Clarke suggested the pair would get married, but now she's not so sure. "What is marriage, anyway? My mother wasn't married. Maybe we'll do it; maybe we won't."

I ask him if he is working on new songs. "I'm always working. I want to work with Cait."

She looks surprised at this. "I'm always up for that," says Cait. "In college, I wanted to put together a band but there wasn't enough interest.

"People would say 'I kinda play the guitar'. It's so ineffectual to say that -- you either play the f***ing guitar, or you don't."

'I Put A Spell On You' is released on Monday. All proceeds go to Concern's Haiti fund.

1. Shane MacGowan was one of the most preternaturally gifted songwriters in pop but has basically destroyed himself and therefore been irrelevant for 20 years - nothing more than a nostalgia act. Right? Or am I missing some outstanding work he's done since Hell's Ditch - ? Discuss.

2. Cait O'Riordan seems to be saying that she was an alcoholic all through her years with Costello. It's none of my business, but how can this square with the standard account of EC as having sobered up during the exact same period? Sounds like that relationship must have been a nice little private hell for Mr. Costello (living with an alcoholic while simultaneously staying relatively dry) - odd, indeed, that his own work wasn't more anguished during the same era in consequence. Such private tumults might explain the creative exhaustion in evidence on a record like When I Was Cruel, though. Anyway, it all seems paradoxical to the impression of an EC who had more or less straightened out in the late 80s-90s. Just a thought.

When man has destroyed what he thinks he owns
I hope no living thing cries over his bones

Poor Deportee wrote:Shane MacGowan was one of the most preternaturally gifted songwriters in pop but has basically destroyed himself and therefore been irrelevant for 20 years - nothing more than a nostalgia act. Right? Or am I missing some outstanding work he's done since Hell's Ditch - ? Discuss.

I think the two albums with the Popes from 1994 and 1997 are quite good, but it's been a long wait for new material since then.

Extracts from a March '08 interview with Cait ( in full earlier in this thread) may clarify things -

From the outside, Cait’s 16-year relationship with singer-songwriter Elvis Costello appeared romantic. “I guess from the outside maybe.”

Legend has it that she and Elvis fell for each other while he was producing the Pogues’ 1985 masterwork Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, on which Cait sang the forlorn classic, I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day, and the Poguetry in Motion EP in 1986. (She later left the band completely to go on Elvis’s American tour with him. And she played Slim McMahon alongside the Pogues, Courtney Love, Joe Strummer, Dennis Hopper and Elvis, in Alex Cox’s 1987 spaghetti rock western Straight to Hell.) What drew her to Elvis was, she believes, that she “needed an excuse not to have to do anything. Not to have to try. You know — if you don’t try, you can’t fail. I just needed something I could hide behind.

“He’s not here, so I’m not going to talk about his motives. But I’m surprised anyone would have put up with the way I behaved for that long. That’s as much as I can say about it.”

Is that not Cait blaming herself for everything?

“Not blaming — taking responsibility, trying to be clear-eyed about it. To take the focus off someone who can’t speak for themselves here,” she says, meaning Elvis.

“You know Pat Henry [the fitness guru who runs the gym on Pembroke Street where Cait and I both go] don’t you? He has told me he knows couples right now where very plainly the man is punishing himself for being successful through his choice of woman. That really resonates with me. I think we can punish ourselves. We can use people to punish ourselves.”

Was that the need Elvis was fulfilling with you?

“You’d have to ask him.”

Is that what you felt?

“I hope it is not true, but it seems, just from my experience, that it might be true.”

Were you ever in love?“No. . . not yet.”

Not even with Elvis Costello? Did you fall in love with Elvis Costello and wake up with Declan MacManus (Elvis’s real name)? “No, it was nothing like that. I was very young. I needed......no one had ever loved me or been affectionate to me in my life and suddenly here’s someone being affectionate and kind and interested. And it was fantastic’.

What went wrong, then?“You'll have to ask him. I didn’t leave him. He left me. I can’t help you on that one, Barry.”

The point is: Elvis was giving you everything you never had. Why didn't you accept and embrace the love, however alien to you, that he was giving to you, rather than withdraw from it?

“Obviously, I had no idea what to do with it.” she says. “I had no experience in retuning affection because I hadn’t been given affection. So it was just completely wasted. I didn’t know any of this until I went to therapy,” she laughs.

Knowing how much Elvis despises our 'confessional' culture and loathes having his personal laundry aired in public - in my opinion he has shown almost pathological tendencies relating to these sorts of matters in interviews - this Cait stuff really must make him want to puke.

John Kelly is joined by Manchan Magan, musician Cait O'Riordan and writer and activist Eamonn McCann to discuss Bad Lietenant: Port of Call New Orleans, starring Nicolas Cage and The Happiest Girl In The World.

Poor Deportee wrote:Knowing how much Elvis despises our 'confessional' culture and loathes having his personal laundry aired in public

And good for him. So many celebrities these days to think tabloids or gossip magazines are marriage counselors.

On the subject of BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, I would encourage you all to go and get it on DVD. It was one of the most entertaining experiences I've had in a movie theatre, especially as I saw it with a great audience who broke into applause at some of the high points.

This article makes me nostalgic for a time when the doings of Elvis Costello were considered relevant enough to the popular culture to warrant coverage in a magazine like that. Imagine that - folks feeling that some passing awareness of EC's latest work is a requirement of knowing 'what's going on.' Those were the days!!

Amen to that! Particularly enjoyed the "life in the fish bowl" aspect towards the end. Ironic when you choose to be a public persona. Outside of last years profile in the New Yorker and that small spread a number of years back in Vanity Fair with a recumbent EC spread out on the piano, cannot recall too many such 'society' pieces about him. Thank you for the memories. Also loved the continued echoing request that singers cast a wider net for material aka his songs- would love to have heard an Ella, Frank or Sarah tackle the material-where are Julie Herber, Cassandra Wilson, Nancy Wilson, etc when you need them?

"....there's a merry song that starts in 'I' and ends in 'You', as many famous pop songs do....'